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Tuesday, April 15, 2008

100 + holes

A few days ago I received a phone call from Heindselman's letting me know they had sent a referral my way for a repair. This is not a new thing; it has happened alot over the past 13 years . They send people to me to repair their vintage items. A few minutes later I received the call from a very nice lady who had a table cloth (wink wink) that had belonged to her grandmother and had been on the dinner table for years at her grandmother's house.

The story goes that the grandmother passed away, and the tablecloth went to the daughter, who was just going to take it to the thrift store because of all the damage to it. Before doing this, she called her own daughter (the granddaughter to the lady who had passed) asking if she wanted it. Yes! was the resounding answer. After contacting Heindelman's and being refereed to me, she called and we had a conversation about said tablecloth. I asked if she was sure it was a tablecloth because most times they are actually bed cloths. She was certain it was. Then, we discussed the damage and when I would travel to her house to see it. After seeing it, I was certain it was a bedspread because it had notches crocheted into it to accommodate bed posts and only had an edging on three sides; definably a bedspread.

I wish I had looked at it a little closer! It has more damage than I thought it did. 100 + holes; to be exact, my estimate on the repair may have been way too low. That has never happened before; usually I am with in 20 dollars of my preliminary estimate. Once I get it home and can asses the damage more, I usually do a follow up estimate. I have yet to work the pattern to see how long it takes, then I have to figure out how long each hole will take to repair, then the cost of supplies. Not to mention I have to figure out the hook size, tension, and match a thread that probably hasn't been made in over 50 years or more. I like challenges like this, and the people who get their family heirlooms back are happy to have them whole again, instead of holey.Old sewing thread repair top left.Holes in the edging in Solomon's knot stitch (also called lovers knot, it has a few more names, too).Holes in mesh stitch around in the edgings.More holes in the edgings.Holes in the center of the medallions in the center of the afghan.

These things are bigger challenges in that other people, over the years, have tried to make homemade repairs in all the wrong ways with sewing thread which cuts through the crochet thread, actually causing more holes in time plus the sewing thread pierces the crochet thread when the needle was stitched through everything to hold it together. This means that I have to either spend lots of time cutting sewing thread, or just cut that section out and spend lots of time re-crocheting a bigger section than if they had just left it alone. Either way, I have my work cut out for me on this one. Enclosed in this post are a few of the holes I get to repair.

The repair to the left isn't sewing thread; it is crochet thread that whoever tried to repair the damaged just kept winding around the stitches. These type of previous repairs are also annoying because it takes forever to unwind that mess. The repair the previous person did is very clunky and big to look at, too; not neat and invisible. I don't make repairs like this.

The center section is made up of squares that are then sewn together (see first picture in post).